Long-term evolution (“LTE”) is a wireless communication standard used for high-speed data for mobile devices and data terminals. LTE-Advanced is a major enhancement to the LTE standard. Within the LTE-Advanced standard, carrier aggregation is used to increase the bandwidth, and thereby increase the bitrates. Carrier aggregation has been introduced in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (“3GPP”) Release 10 (LTE-Advanced standard) to provide wider than 20 MHz transmission bandwidth to a single device (e.g., user equipment or “UE”) while maintaining the backward compatibility with legacy UEs.
Under the current standards, each aggregated carrier is referred to as a component carrier, and each component carrier can have a bandwidth of 1.4, 3, 5, 10, 15 or 20 MHz and a maximum of five component carriers can be aggregated. As illustrated in FIG. 1, five component carriers may each have a bandwidth of 20 MHz to combine for a total bandwidth of 100 MHz. With carrier aggregation features enabled, the LTE-Advanced standard may meet peak downlink (“DL”) throughput requirement, or 1 Gbps.